Dean's Diary- Advancing to the Quarter-Finals of the America's Cup WS

Dean Barker, Emirates Team NZ skipper and Director of www.kiwiyachting.co.nz!Kiwi_Yachting_Consultants_and_Nexus_AB, reports from San Francisco, USA from the America's Cup World Series, in which he helms Emirates Team NZ .

Today was the first day of racing in this ACWS event and we had the match race qualifiers to determine the five boats who would proceed through to join the top 3 from the last event. Our race was against Nathan Outteridge and his Artemis Red Team.

Arriving on the race course today we were greeted with some dramatically different weather than the previous few days. The fog was back in force and so was the wind. We had breeze sitting over 20 knots for most of the afternoon but it was the ebb current which caused the most issues for the Teams today. Wind against tide here is certainly challenging especially when the tides are big (up to 4 knots at times).

In our race we got off to a good start and controlled the race well to post a win and proceed to our quarterfinal tomorrow. We will face off against Energy Team which should be a good match up. We race that at around 12:30 then have a 4 hour wait until the fleet racing begins just after five. A long day in store but should be some good wind again.

It will be good to get into the fleet racing tomorrow and see if we can improve on where we left off last month.